Reinstated

Good! I shared the same headline in class, the morning after. Once in a while, school administrators get things right:

Clarksville, TN — the APSU professor who was fired over a post he shared online about the death of Charlie Kirk, has been reinstated. He was fired for resharing a 2023 headline that said, "Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths 'Unfortunately' Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment." Then Sen. Marsha Blackburn shared his post calling for the university to take action.

https://www.threads.com/@allie4tn/post/DS5n_efkU9J?xmt=AQF014Eu4a3E7IgbJRH9K1grF5eYm6lV-mQ2WUT-ibMys6o0yS3y7EznwdMpMbnV6n2NwryL&slof=1

Distaff literacy

All of the top 10 books borrowed through the public library app Libby were written by women. And Kristin Hannah's The Women was the top checkout in many library systems around the country.

https://www.threads.com/@npr/post/DS7aFSfjpx2?xmt=AQF0ngQZNOs31lKMOQY9Xq_G7xhqFGdOjkAr8uXqDIhoz3OOJq3lwbUPuQt81PJqjaTE_ts&slof=1

Useful fiction, stubborn facts

Someone on the Internet asked the William James Society if a useful fiction can be true.
WJ's reply:

Literary fiction can be true in the pragmatic sense, definitely. But unlike my shallower younger brother the novelist, I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. We pragmatists do not deny reality. We do sometimes attempt to defy it.

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mb7gbzit2c22

Another best of ‘25 list

Fresh Air's book critic says her picks tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Karen Russell's The Antidote was her favorite.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/08/nx-s1-5634019/best-books-2025-maureen-corrigan?utm_social_post_id=635253313&utm_social_handle_id=9173694336003200&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads.net&utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr

Better thinkers

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads.

https://buff.ly/SWhY0c0

the task of education

"Like Rousseau, Kant criticizes parents who have their children taught solely with an eye to their career prospects and making money, and rulers who see schools and universities as nothing more than training grounds to maximize the efficiency of their subjects. Instead, it is the task of education to improve the world by turning individuals into better people: "Good education is exactly that from which all good in the world arises." "

— Kant: A Revolution in Thinking by Marcus Willaschek

I Teach College Students How to Argue With Their Families

Good advice for the classroom, too:

…Few things can calm a savage heart like being genuinely listened to. Keep listening. Ask constructive questions. No reactions, not yet. Unless the speaker has a political psychopathology going on (which, in the current environment, is not as rare as it should be), he will soften. His voice will modulate; he'll stop sweating.

Now, finally, it's your turn. Speak your piece. Be detached, genial, even kind, but say what's on your mind. Prefix fraught opinions with a simple qualifier. "I might be wrong, but …."

I might be wrong: It's simple to the point of banality, but in my experience, highly effective.

Prepare by doing research. Do some reading. Be respectful. If you can create a rich, humane conversation, you may learn something. As Emerson says, "Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn from him."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/opinion/jacques-lacan-holiday-arguments.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Nothing serious

I can relate.

"Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month. During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels, which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children."

"The Letters of William James, Vol. II": https://a.co/7orKwS6

Artificial learning

Cautionary warning for my upcoming Philosophy in Recent American Fiction course:

"All I want for Christmas is to have my brain scrubbed of the memory of teaching a university-level literature course where most students used AI to tell them what the books were about and then also used AI to tell me what they thought about the books."

https://www.threads.com/@annasandyelrod/post/DSfpbY_iSuF?xmt=AQF0tMZ1NskaVYuYlU8maJd3ef_ngVHjxLuJ9bGQUAaJ2UyhV1ab79qOALAYfukA4ftq8Xa5&slof=1

Popular check-outs

What were the most popular books checked out in US libraries in 2025? Here are the top fiction and nonfiction titles across 40 libraries.

https://bookriot.com/the-most-popular-books-in-us-public-libraries-in-2025/

Best of ‘25

https://fivebooks.com/category/fiction/the-best-novels-of-2025/

Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.

I can confirm this: most of my 1st-year college students have not been assigned a whole book.

...When teachers do assign whole books, they often choose from a stagnant list of classics.

A major benefit of a whole class reading a whole novel together is the muscle it builds for citizenship and debating big ideas, Dr. White argued.

"Maybe most important is the common project," he said, "of engaging other young people in a conversation about a book that is open to multiple interpretations."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-teachers-assigning-books.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8E8.hlhG.QaCa57howt1G&smid=em-share

Coming to MTSU, Spring ‘26–

MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) 6050-Philosophy in Recent American Fiction

(For more info: phil.oliver@mtsu.edu... https://prafmtsu.blogspot.com/)

We'll all read three novels* together, and each of us will additionally read and report on either a fourth novel or on a specific author's life and works.** 

"Philosophy" = searching for wisdom, clarity, enlightenment, meaning, perspective, purpose, reality, truth, understanding, ... especially with regard to the human impact on nature, the environment, other species, & other humans.

"Recent" = 21st century

*The three novels:

1. Richard Ford, Be Mine

2. Richard Powers, Playground (see below #) 

3. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Argyments for the Existence of God

**Possible fourth choices, for individual reports: 

• The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015) - A satirical look at race and identity that won the Man Booker Prize.

• The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (2022) - Explores themes of memory, connection, and digital surveillance. 

• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024) - Considers whether the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. 

• Any of the earlier Frank Bascombe novels by Richard Ford...

• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016) - Explores the lasting impacts of slavery and the search for identity across generations.

• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012) - Explores climate change, ecological disruption, and human responsibility. 

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2024) - a new take on Dickens' Copperfield.

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) - A harrowing journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape, meditating on survival, love, and morality.

• A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (2020) - Set in a near-apocalyptic world, it examines generational responsibility and environmental collapse.

• Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (2022) - Dystopian fiction about cultural repression and familial bonds.

• The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) - A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel weaving interrelated stories about trees, nature, and activism. 

• Bewilderment by Richard Powers (2021) - This novel delves deeply into themes of ecological awareness and the human condition through the story of a father and his neurodivergent son.

• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (2019) - Investigates issues of race, privilege, and morality in contemporary America.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022) - This narrative explores human creativity and relationships within the context of gaming and artificial intelligence.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004) - A profound exploration of faith, mortality, and legacy in small-town America.

• Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein...

• The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (2007 meditates on time, love, and mortality in a manner reminiscent of late James or even Santayana.

• A Children’s Bible (2020) and Dinosaurs (2022) by Lydia Millet, perhaps our sharpest living ecological moralist. She writes with a mix of irony and tenderness about apocalypse, indifference, and human responsibility to the more-than-human world.
• The Woman Upstairs (2013), The Emperor’s Children (2006) by Claire Messud.
  Messud’s work probes questions of authenticity, ambition, and moral compromise—what Sartre called mauvaise foi in a modern American key.
• The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018) by Rachel Kushner
  Both novels interrogate freedom, rebellion, and moral responsibility within systems of art, politics, and incarceration.
• Fates and Furies (2015), Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff
  Matrix, in particular, is a striking meditation on creative power, spirituality, and women’s community—an existential study of agency within constraint. Medieval monastic life reimagined as a feminist parable of creation, solitude, and visionary leadership. Philosophical focus: Meliorism, the work of care, and the imagination of better worlds within the constraints of necessity — what it means to “find delight in dark times.”
• The History of Love (2005), Forest Dark (2017) by Nicole Krauss
  Krauss brings a metaphysical sensibility to questions of love, art, and transcendence—often through a quasi-Kabbalistic lens.
• Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood 
• The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

**Possible authors,  for individual reports:

• Michael Chabon

• Jennifer Egan

• Richard Ford

• Jonathan Franzen

• Barbara Kingsolver

• Rachel Kushner

• Ann Patchett

• Richard Powers

• Marilyn Robinson

• Philip Roth

• Tom Piazza

• Your suggestions...

I asked ChatGPT to draft a story combining the voices and themes of Richard Ford and Richard Powers, narrated by Frank Bascombe…

Culpability

Set at a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay, a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence, from the bestselling author of the “wise and addictive” (New York Times) The Gifted School.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative. g'r

The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza

This is delightful. And so is Tom's latest book about his friendship with John Prine, late  in John's life. Met him at the southern festival of books this past October. 

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers' Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63920580-the-auburn-conference

 

The best fiction audiobooks of 2025

Selected by the editors at @audiofilemagazine, who reviewed 2000+ audiobooks this year.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-best-fiction-audiobooks-of-2025-audiofile-editors/

America - hope we find it!

 

"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy, " I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost, " I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Paul Simon
America lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC